Pessimism at its Finest

My second semester of senior year was a bit of a joke. My first block, I aided for a gym teacher who had a free period first block. Meaning I could come in late and when I did get there, I could watch sports center for an hour and a half. My second class of the day was a cooking class in which participation was the grade. My third class of the day was basically a student run psychology class where we could virtually talk the teacher out of giving us any work whatsoever, and my last class of the day was my only "real" class, and unfortunately was calculus.

On thursday I received an unusually large amount of homework one night and decided to put it off until my free hour and a half at the beginning of the day the following morning. There was my first mistake. I stroll into the gym the next day only to find out that there is a school wide assembly going on and was scheduled to take up all of first block. No problem, I think to myself, I'll just do it during second block. Wrong. I forgot we were cooking a big meal for one of our exams that day, which also took up the whole block. Now onto psychology where, first thing, my teacher collects the writing assignment that we were supposed to do last night. Needless to say, I didn't have it. So now, over the weekend, I had to finish the assignment that was due, and do ANOTHER one due to the fact that I didn't turn the first one in on time. Awesome. Now onto calculus where, again, my teacher collects homework first thing. I get a zero on the assignment and she proceeds to pass out tests from last week, which I found out that I failed. After receiving the tests, she gives us a new one to take. I didn't know this at the time, but I would end up failing that one as well. Now so far my day has consisted of a plethora of late grades on homework and two failing test grades. And I haven't even been to wrestling practice yet...

Now that you've seen my day through the school aspect, I'll walk you through my day through a wrestling perspective. The first thing that hits me this morning, and every morning, is the hunger. The last thing I ate was a granola bar at 8pm the night before. I get to have two pieces of bread for breakfast today, which needless to say, does absolutely nothing to help my hunger. All day I am hungry and dehydrated and tired and keep losing the little focus I have. At lunch, I'm forced to sit and watch my friends eat from the taco bar, which is absolutely superb by the way, while I eat my canned chicken and an apple.

Finally, school lets out and it's time to go to wrestling practice. I wrestle in 171 pound weight class, meaning that on saturday morning I have to weigh 171 pounds exactly or less in order to be qualified for the tournament. It's kind of an unspoken rule that if you don't make weight, coach beats your ass in practice the following week, and let's just say you never miss weight again. So before practice, I weigh myself hoping to see maybe 174 or 175 pop up on the red and black digital screen. When I saw the number, my stomach dropped. I weighed in before practice at a staggering 178.2 pounds. My coach peeks as the scale and just laughs. I had to lose 7.2 pounds before the following morning. Man, this day just keeps getting better and better. I layer myself in sweats and start running before practice begins. Then, a two hour practice ensues, and I stay after for about forty-five minutes and jumprope non-stop. When I'm done jump roping, I just lay down on the mat. I'm pretty sure I was paralyzed for a couple minutes. I had been running on empty all day and was ready to quit wrestling and school forever. As I was looking up at the fluorescent lights, I was wondering why I put myself through all this, and if it was worth it. I strip down and walk slowly over to the scale. 171.2. Good enough for me, I'll lose two pounds in my sleep.

I have can of chicken and a small glass of water for dinner, and as I'm laying in bed, pondering the universe, thinking about the fact that I have to wake up at five the next morning, I realized that the best thing that happened today was that I was only .2 pounds overweight at the end of wrestling practice, what a shitty day...

By Kyle Knight